1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to the field of carcass processing, and more particularly, to a water disinfection, recovery and re-use process used in the processing of poultry.
2. Background of the Related Art
A typical poultry processing plant receives live animals from the grow-out farms, slaughters the animals, drains the blood and then removes the feathers, “paws,” heads and detritus in the initial stages of processing. The carcasses are then sent to mechanized evisceration where the internal organs, digestive tract and other edible and inedible parts are removed. In typical operations, some of the internal organs (i.e., heart, liver and gizzards) are harvested for food products. The carcasses are thereafter sent by way of mechanized line operations through a series of washing and sanitizing steps before the product is shipped as “fresh” product or packaged for freezing. These line operations typically consume large quantities of water.
Accordingly, the poultry processing industry has generally been characterized as a large volume consumer of water in conducting the slaughter, processing and packing of animals for both human consumption and other uses. Recent initiatives by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), under the jurisdiction of the Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS), have resulted in a further increase in the volume of water used to wash poultry carcasses to meet the more stringent requirements of “0 pathogen tolerance”.
In addition, poultry industry interests have been actively seeking methods of reducing the consumption of water due to economic reasons and, additionally in some cases, because of limited availability of sufficient volumes of water to meet the processing requirements. Still other considerations involving limited water treatment resources have raised the need to reduce water consumption. It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide new solutions to reducing the volume of water required for processing poultry or other foodstuffs.
Prior processes have not focused on the need to conserve water from an economic perspective and accordingly, while they may generally involve water reuse applications, their approaches have failed to address critical economic restrictions inherent in poultry and other food processing operations. It is yet another object of the present invention to provide water reuse processes which are economically feasible and which provide improved savings to the food-preparing manufacturer.
Typical of prior approaches have been efforts directed to the recovery, treatment and recycle of poultry chiller bath water in a closed loop and “semi-closed loop” type of process where water from the chiller baths is treated to remove solids, fats, oil, grease, organic compounds and microorganisms before reintroducing the treated water to the chiller baths.
These efforts may be characterized as primarily aimed at reducing the electrical power considerations in chilling the water used in these systems of processing operations. These goals are generally met by reusing the already cooled chiller water and trying to reintroduce the already chilled water back into the chiller makeup feed water, thereby reducing the temperature of incoming fresh water. However, the recovery of used chiller bath process water brings with it a very high contamination burden requiring extensive treatment. Representative examples of such approaches have been described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,728,305; 5,173,190; 5,178,755; 5,053,140; 4,790,943; and 5,593,598. While such approaches have had some limited success in addressing the treatment challenges, they have to date proven to be of questionable economic value to the industry. It is still another object of the present invention to address such deficiencies with new approaches and devices, which are economically sensitive.
Prior efforts have also generated a substantial number of devices designed to provide some filtering efforts. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,759,415; 5,248,439; 5,132,010; 4,876,004; 4,844,189; 4,481,080 and 3,912,533 provide representative examples of such devices. As will be readily noted, some are structurally complex requiring substantial capital expenses and others, while simpler in structure, are aimed at solving different needs. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,481,080 shows a series of printouts separated by baffles for equalizing the residence times of large and small particles. It has been discovered that such solutions are either unnecessarily complex or are unnecessary altogether. It is another aspect of the present invention to provide devices useful in water recovery and treatment methods, which avoid such deficiencies and solve the needs of removing gross levels of contaminants quickly, effectively and economically.
In several of the inventions referenced the inventors have directed their efforts at chilled water reuse claiming significant savings in Btu requirements. The devices employed have focused upon the recovery, treatment and reuse of the USDA required 0.5 gallon per bird overflow. While the technical approaches may differ from invention to invention, they share the disadvantages that the source of their water (i.e., bird chiller water) contains a significant and high quantity of organic contaminants as compared to the sources that are identified by the inventors herein, and the volumes available for recovery are limited strictly to the USDA mandated 0.5 gallon per bird limitation. It is yet another object of the present invention to avoid the disadvantages associated with such prior art approaches.